Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Summary: What to do when one needs eggnog in a hurry? My "grand mal" recipe takes hours, a sturdy mixer, and a light hand. This one is quite good and takes much less work - you can put it together in a bit over an hour - and most of that is time for it to chill in the fridge. All it takes is a quick trip to the supermarket and a blender. Thanks for Jeff Morgenthaler for working out this recipe!

Rest of Post - We do a lot of searching and reading on the internet and in the blogosphere. One of the sources we trust is Jeff Morgenthaler's Blog, which we read regularly. So when Jeff said he had spent time experimenting and liked his results, we thought we ought to give his recipe a try. Since we are always pouring for a crowd, I plugged his recipe into my spreadsheet and made 3x the amounts, however here is the starting point:

Chill for at least an hour. You want it to be (1) cold and (2) to let the flavors combine. I've always been skeptical about this (2), but since my experience with Jasper's Jamaican Planter's Punch I've become a total believer.

Serve in chilled wine or champagne glasses, sprinkle additional nutmeg on top before serving.

Compared to what I've been making previously, this eggnog is rather thin - low on body and "mouth feel", but long on taste. In researching this I've seen a LOT of recipes that call for mixing egg yolks with warm milk or doing a very limited amount of cooking of the egg yolks - I didn't find many specifics on increase in thickness / body, but the photos made it look thicker - and more yellow.

This recipe yields a nog that is warm brown color (not yellow), and smells good, flavors are rummy and buttery, People said it was "gorgeous", "good blend of alcohol and flavor," "quite lovely", "almost pepperminty."

We really liked Jeff's recommendation of Sailor Jerry's spiced rum - somehow the whole drink had a nice buttery flavor, and it was more pleasant than Captain Morgan's - which has always seemed fine previously. One thing we did discover this year is that Applejack blends extremely well with eggnog, in fact its fairly hard to taste in eggnog, so if you are looking to spike your eggnog in a very subtle way*, get a bottle of Lairds, or preferably Laird's Bonded.

We have four related research projects for next winter - November / December 2010 - stay tuned!

*We believe in alerting our guests to the alcohol content of our drinks and punches. The math isn't hard, especially if (like me) you use a spreadsheet. Also, alert people when there is something about the drink (like high fat content, or gomme syrup) that will slow down the absorption of alcohol - you want them to make the best decisions about how much they want to drink.